#406: SCHMUTZIE'S GOTTA HAVE SLEEP, BABY, OR THAT BATTLE HYMN'S GONNA GET HER

Paper Napkin tells us that it is National De-Lurking Week, so if you're here and able to spell nominally well, please leave a comment. Sheryl (of Paper Napkin) is from the United States, but I am going to take the liberty of extending De-Lurking Week across the border into Canada.

I am a total sucker for comments, so it would please me to no end if you left me a note to say hello.

I woke up at 2:00 am in a state of confusion. I was in a state of confusion, because I felt completely overwhelmed by my own irritability. What the hell was it? Dream imagery lingered in my head: teeth through a sneer in a feral human mouth, bloody lips, primal anger.

Also, I suddenly remembered that I kept dreaming that my fillings in the back of my mouth were loose. I could suck them part way out, and then when I bit back down it would feel funny, like I suddenly had differently shaped teeth that didn't match up with each other.

And then, I realized what one of the things was that was sparking my irritableness. He was breathing. The Fiery One was breathing next to me very obnoxiously. I have issues with other people's breathing, and they go like this: I don't like people breathing too near my head, in the same confined space as me, or in any way that leaves me able to feel their breath rushing out around my nose or mouth when I am trying to breathe in. To me, it's the equivalent of drinking somebody else's spit.

The Fiery One was stomping all over my personal breathing territory. He had pushed himself up high and into the middle of the bed, so he was puffing all his warm, sleep-stinky breath into my personal breathing zone. I did my best to try to breathe out during his exhale and breathe in during his inhale so as to minimize my foreign breath ingestion, but that only made me feel like I was hyperventilating.

Then, when I decided to risk waking him up and asked him to shove the hell over, he grabbed my ass. I felt like I was revisiting the country bar my friends used to drag me to in Cosmopolis where mouthbreathers would insist that they could teach me how to two-step.*

Oskar, not to be left out of any kind of social interaction, was insisting that he sit on my feet, despite my restlessness and remorseless kicking (don't worry, he's flexible and young). When my kicking became too much for the little five-pound gaffer, he yawned, stretched, and repositioned himself so that he, too, could breath into my mouth. Oskar has sinus issues due to his being terribly ill when we first got him, so his breathing sometimes sounds like a kid eating wet peanutbutter with its mouth open. It was fabulous.

Then I became acutely aware that our sheets were no longer so fresh. And they kept wrapping themselves around my wrists and ankles. And was that really a loose filling in my mouth?!

At 2:15 am, I had had all I could take with the breathing and the bedding and the rising wee-hours paranoia, so I got up and played on the internet. At 4:00 am, I went to the bathroom, and the face that confronted me in the mirror was red-rimmed and puffy with 1970s heroin-chic mascara circles smudged under my eyes. Hella hot, it was not, so I did my best to fall asleep under the abject conditions that marriage and pet ownership had foisted upon me.

My weakened state allowed for one more hour of sleep, and then it was off to work! where my tired brain played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"** over and over! and I drank six cups of coffee! and still, I fell asleep on the bus ride home!

Now, in an effort to counteract these anxious jitters that the coffee has left behind, I am drinking an old bottle of beer from the refrigerator. If that doesn't work, I am sure that we have some leftover wine around here. Or at least a bottle of vanilla. I would do anything at this point to kill off this verse:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men freeWhile God is marching on.

It's all wrong for me. Firstly, I gave up Christianity seventeen years ago. Secondly, when I did succumb to the enforced church attendance of my childhood, I was milkfed on pacifism. And thirdly, what is so wrong with having some Devendra Banhart or Antony and the Johnsons in my head instead?

Cheers to the efficacy of a bottle of beer and physical exhaustion!

* Except that the Fiery One is way cuter than the bumpkin mouthbreathers ever were, and I usually don't mind it when he grabs my ass.

** The second line of the second verse has always bugged me: They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps. Builded? Dews and damps? Methinks someone was being a touch loose with the old English language there.